Submerged Autobiographies

What a pleasant change this truncated biography is from the 900– or 1200–page blockbusters currently favored by authors and publishers! Short as it is, Janet Malcolm’s account of the life and times of Gertrude Stein, one of the stars of modernism, is substantial; and it offers some surprising revelations. The other life is, of course, that of Alice B. Toklas. There is little the biographer finds noteworthy in her pre-Gertrude days spent in Oakland, of which Gertrude famously observed that there was no there there; but Alice comes into her own in her post-Gertrude days, and we are told a lot about that. Malcolm begins with an amusing recollection of the delight she and “the pretentious young persons” she associated with found in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, written by the chef herself, not her companion, as in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Alice figures in Two Lives not as an alter ego but as the repository of all the practicalities forsworn by Gertrude—as typist, gardener, business manager, kitchen mechanic—and ultimately as the protectress of the reputation of her partner.

Janet Malcolm, whose reputation rests on her unwinking depiction of the journalist’s necessary manipulations, offers in this book cogent observations about the biographer’s art. And as a knowledgeable Freudian she writes with authority about these two lives (her title echoes Gertrude Stein’s trio of stories, Three Lives). The sexual aspect of the relationship does not detain her (it is detailed in one of six short footnotes), but her psychological insights are carefully set forth throughout, with nothing doctrinaire about them. The most important fact of Gertrude Stein’s early life is that she was the youngest of five children. Malcolm lets Gertrude explain the significance: “I had privileges the privilege of petting the privilege of being the youngest one. If that does happen it is not lost all the rest of one’s life, there you are you are privileged, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and this is the way I still am, and any one who is like that necessarily liked it. I did and do.”

Feeling privileged provided the rationale for Stein’s exploitation of Alice B. (whose nickname for Gertrude was Baby), but Janet Malcolm shows us how she held being forever taken care of as a birthright, a notion that shaded over into a confidence that everyone was susceptible to her charm, which was “as conspicuous as her fatness, and surely accounts for the way people were always practically lining up to be of service to her.” One of the interests of this biography is the reader’s perceiving how the services of friends helped in confirming Gertrude’s “playful egomania,” in stimulating her “preternatural cheerfulness” and “her habitual attempt to be bright,” which Malcolm sees as “a defining characteristic of her life and her art.” But, when Gertrude presents herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as “one of the world’s greatest geniuses, and of every other person as someone put on earth only to irritate or to amuse her,” Malcolm sees it not as a representation of the way Gertrude saw herself but as “a reflection of . . . the way she thought about biographical representation.” Maybe. But, if so, then we must credit Stein with ceaselessly displaying a sense of irony. In her pamphlet on Picasso (one of her most readable writings), she describes herself as doing with language what Picasso does with paint, identifying herself not only with Cubism but with the genius Picasso. When a friend declared that “the three people of first rate importance he had met in his life were Picasso, Gertrude Stein and André Gide,” Gertrude responded: “Why include Gide?”

An account of these two lives must, of course, include their writing. Janet Malcolm’s literary criticism is of a high caliber. She reports conversations with three leading Stein scholars who differentiate what they call her “real” writing from her “audience” writing; all three...